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Friday, March 21, 2014

You know what, I think I'm over this whole gun thing.

George Wasson

Non-musical post today, sorry. A cousin of mine, and one of my older living relatives, was murdered with a gun this week in Eugene, Oregon, in the house where he lived since I was a kid, about a 7 minute walk from the house where I grew up, and where my mother still lives. George was a peaceful guy, a scholar of Native American history and culture in Oregon; it's remarkable to me that one guy with a firearm— inherently a cowardly weapon; I see guns primarily as enablers for cowards to commit violence— can, in a second, wipe out a whole lifetime of learning, knowledge, and experience. There aren't many people studying the histories of the tribes he did, and not that many tribal elders period, so a not-insignificant part of the living knowledge of their history is gone. From the University of Oregon's remembrance:

George Bundy Wasson, an elder of the Coquille Indian Tribe, renowned storyteller and longtime fixture at the University of Oregon, died Wednesday at his home in Eugene under tragic circumstances. He was 79.

Eugene police say they suspect Wasson was killed by an acquaintance, Ricardo Antonio Chaney, at his home, and that Chaney subsequently set fire to Wasson’s house, according to news reports.

Wasson first enrolled at the UO in 1953 as an undergraduate, studying music. By his own account he struggled, so he took a break before returning in 1968 to complete his degree. He went on to earn a master’s degree in education in 1971, and it was while studying for his master’s he was hired as assistant dean of students, and served in the Office of Academic Advising and Student Services until retiring in 1989.

“Even now I have a number of students tell me my advice or guidance changed their lives,” he said in a 1996 interview. “A lot of students have become some of my best friends. I have gone through their marriages, births and deaths. That is special and rewarding.”

He earned another master’s degree in 1994, and received a Ph.D. in anthropology in 1996. After earning his doctoral degree, he was an assistant professor in the UO’s Central Oregon program in Bend, and in 2006, he was an adjunct professor of history. From 2004 to 2011, he was an adjunct instructor in anthropology.

Wasson helped found the Native American Student Union at the UO in the late 1960s, said Gordon Bettles, a longtime friend of Wasson’s and steward of the Many Nations Longhouse.

George was the son of my grandmother's sister, Bess Finley and George B. Wasson, the senior— a charismatic Indian affairs attorney— who ran off together in the 1920's. He was the grandson of a “real” Indian, a woman who spoke a number of Indian dialects, and, in the early part of her life, would've worn indigenous clothing of deer skin, grass, and cedar bark; who married a white immigrant logger, a George Richardson Wasson, in the 1860's. The generations have a long reach into the past with my family, and its offshoots. Our late George's life overlapped with his grandmother's, and must have been one of the last few people to have known “stone age” members of his tribe first hand, and whatever knowledge he had of them, that did not make it into his scholarly works, has now been annihilated.

I don't know if the small, cowardly, rage-addicted person who killed him would have done so by another means if a gun was not readily available to him (he had several, including one of those useless pieces of garbage, an AR-15 military rifle), or if he would've gone to the trouble of acquiring one illegally. I do know that the gun industry and gun lobby is hell bent on getting as many firearms as possible into circulation among the American populace, and on enabling and normalizing their use in everyday situations, via things like “Stand Your Ground” laws. It's fucking sick, and their mythology of self-defense against rampant crime— a thinly-veiled appeal to racism— and of checking government oppression is a joke. I'm fresh out of patience with it.

You can read the rest of the U of O remembrance after the break:

“We shared the same interests and issues facing the tribes,” said Bettles, a member of the Klamath Tribe. “We needed to put our minds together.”

Bettles said he’ll miss Wasson’s sense of humor and his storytelling.

“It’s not there anymore,” he said. “The experience he had, the knowledge he had of the Western Oregon tribes, was phenomenal.

“What I learned from George was how to put the truth out in front. He said, ‘If no one is going to tell (students) how to see the truth, how are they going to learn?’

David Hubin, senior assistant to the president, said Wasson conceived and helped lead the Southwest Oregon Research Program, in which he and other Oregon tribal members traveled to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in the 1990s to gather documents about Indian culture in Oregon, which they brought back and gave to the tribes. The documents are stored at the Knight Library.

“He was known and regarded as an inveterate, wonderful storyteller in native oral traditions,” Hubin said.

As recently as last Tuesday, Wasson participated in an evening storytelling event at the Many Nations Longhouse.

In teaching his anthropology class on Oregon Indians, Wasson sought to fill gaps in Coquille and southwest Oregon history, and to dispel myths about Oregon’s native peoples.

"There is so little known about the southwest coast of Oregon because the cultures of the people were dissipated so rapidly at the time of settlement and white contact,” Wasson said in the 1996 interview. “Almost nothing was collected of Coquille tradition, culture, history, ethnography and language. That's one of the driving forces for me, and I enjoy being a bridge between cultural anthropology and archaeology.”

3 comments:

As I would expect, you brought a broad perspective to this piece that really illuminates the loss beyond what the rest of us have articulated. The loss of the man is enough, but the loss of his experience, his work, his place in the world....it's so much more. Meaning, accomplishment and light extinguished in a bloody second by a slimeball with a gun.

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